There has to be more to the story here. With the law starting in 2006, why are authorities just now going after these bars? Did something specific start this, or is it just the growing authoritarianism that comes with these endlessly long national emergencies?
You're probably right. There must have been some activity that drew the attention of law enforcement. It is a de facto obligation for cafés to offer free internet, so it's surprising to see such a law enforced in Grenoble of all places. My friend's café in Paris just has a password protected network, and I know for a fact they do not log traffic. I have seen other cafés with a registration system, and I'd bet those networks maintain logs. For the smaller cafés, even if they knew they had to, I'm not sure they would have the technical know-how to maintain logs. They've had some problems with piracy in the past, so perhaps that might have something to do with the arrests in Grenoble.
If torrenting or some other form of piracy happens on a network, ISPs send letters to that IP's customer, giving them a warning. Perhaps these café owners were repeatedly warned to enact stricter measures against piracy (i.e. logs), and, failing that, they were arrested for failing to comply with other regulations that are actually enforceable. I can't imagine a café owner could ever be charged with piracy for maintaining an open network.
For what it's worth, I looked around Le Monde and some other news sites to find more information, but there isn't much info to expand on the fact that these people were arrested.
Possibly they annoyed the mayor or something. I've heard a similar story from France before, business doesn't stay on the right side of the right people and suddenly they're shut down for violating some obscure law. I'm sure it happens elsewhere too (uk planning laws seem ripe for this sort of thing)
> For the smaller cafés, even if they knew they had to, I'm not sure they would have the technical know-how to maintain logs.
There are cheap off-the-shelf solutions marketed specifically for bars to setup public wifis.
> If torrenting or some other form of piracy happens on a network, ISPs send letters to that IP's customer, giving them a warning. Perhaps these café owners were repeatedly warned to enact stricter measures against piracy (i.e. logs)
The thing that happened here is not related to HADOPI, the worst that can happen to you with hadopi is losing your internet service or having to pay a fine.
The likely thing that happened is that some patron did something illegal enough to warrant a court order asking the ISP to provide logs, the logs led to the bar which couldn't provide their own logs. ISP rates for court orders are expensive, so the police is unlikely to enjoy this dead end.
The "garde a vue" was probably unnecessary, but this kind of overreach is common in France.
well these are anti-terorism laws, so i doubt theyd go arrest someone if it was just being used for piracy purposes. which is probably why this is so uncommon that its newsworthy.
Less so in France: virtually everybody that would sip 2-3EUR coffees has a 19EUR cellular plan with unlimited data. And that's the price if you're not bundling and not playing off providers off eachother.
Can confirm. Having dropped my mobile in the bath (...) I needed wifi yesterday and only the fifth café I tried in provincial France had wifi available. (And that didn't work until I adjusted my settings to use the DHCP server's provided DNS...)
Now I wonder if it's this law that made it not worth the effort for them.
Many EU tourists as well, here you can still get sub GB plans, and unlimited is twice what it is in France, and if you're not savvy, four times is possible too.
> There has to be more to the story here. With the law starting in 2006, why are authorities just now going after these bars?
The law states that businesses must keep some log in case an investigation about patrons' net usage requires it. It's not checked every day, but when an investigation happens and you got nothing to show, you get prosecuted.
Pretty similar to accounting, the minute details of your accounting won't get checked every year, but you must keep them available for the tax service.
The difference being that you maintain your own accounting records, and any discrepancy is a result of your own failings, whereas WiFi logs can be expected in practice to contain entirely fictitious information for the majority of ordinary users due to no fault of the cafe. Which makes them totally useless and any requirement to keep them a wasteful burden and a trap for the unwary with no countervailing benefit.
Probably someone did “something” from this cafe’s wifi network, the judge asked for the logs, and the owner said he didn’t have them, which is a violation of the law.
